Speaker
Description
Academic speaking is one of the main skills needed in international scientific communication online, as attested by the growing number of studies on both traditional and emergent spoken and multimodal academic genres (Charles, 2021; Luzón & Pérez-Llantada, 2019). Still, although intonation is an inescapable feature of spoken discourse, few studies have addressed it analytically. This study looks at the contribution of intonation to spoken academic discourse by analysing the most frequent intonation groups in a small ad-hoc corpus of 47 videos where researchers present methodological procedures. The intonation groups are analysed drawing from Hafner’s (2018) move analysis and the functions of intonation as described in Tench (1996, 2011) and Gussenhoven (1984, 2004). The analysis shows that frequent intonation groups are used functionally in the same moves, fulfilling similar communicative purposes. This is shown by a detailed analysis of the division of speech into these groups, the emphasized words in each group, and the tunes used to present the information they convey. These findings are relevant to highlight the importance of using intonation actively in academic speaking for the purposes of the speaker and the furtherance of their communicative aims, arguing that a neglect of the use of intonation might result in delivering the messages in a less efficient way, as the data suggest. This line of though favours the idea that intonation needs to be taught in courses that deal with speaking in English for Academic Purposes.
References
Charles, M. (2021). EAP Research in BALEAP 1975-2019: Past issues and future directions. Journal of English for Academic Purpose, 55, 101060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2021.101060.
Gussenhoven, C. (1984). A semantic analysis of the nuclear tones of English. In On the Grammar and Semantics of Sentence Accents (pp. 193–290). Foris Publications. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110859263.193
Gussenhoven, C. (2004). The Phonology of Tone and Intonation. Cambridge University Press.
Hafner, C. A. (2018). Genre innovation and multimodal expression in scholarly communication: Video methods articles in experimental biology. Ibérica, 36, 15–42. http://www.aelfe.org/documents/36_01_IBERICA.pdf
Luzón, M. J., & Pérez-Llantada, C. (2019). Science Communication on the Internet: Old genres meet new genres. John Benjamins.
Tench, P. (1996). The Intonation Systems of English. Cassell.
Tench, P. (2011). Transcribing the Sound of English. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511698361
Biographical note(s) of the author(s)
Research Fellow at the Department of English and German, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, interested in the role and status of English in the domain of academic communication, the analysis of academic spoken genres for research communication purposes, especially in digital environments. Connected research interests are English phonetics and pronunciation teaching, corpus linguistics, and computer science.
Affiliation of the author(s)
University of Zaragoza (Spain)
| Contact e-mail address | mvela@unizar.es |
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